The present invention relates to the processing of video image sequences, and more particularly to a semi-automatic method for Kalman tracking of color objects within the video image sequence.
With the advent of digital television and the resulting large bandwidth requirements for baseband video signals, compression techniques become ever more important. The currently accepted standard for television compression that provides the most compression while still resulting in acceptable decoded images is the MPEG2 standard. This standard compresses an image using one of three types of compressed frames—an Independently compressed frame, a predictively compressed frame and a bi-directional predictively compressed frame. This standard operates on the images as a whole.
However the content of images may be composed of several objects, such as tennis players and a ball, in front of a background, such as spectators. It is posited that if the objects (tennis players and ball) are separated out from the background (spectators), then the objects may be compressed separately for each frame, but the background only needs to be compressed once since it is relatively static. To this effect many techniques have been proposed for separating objects from the background, as indicated in the recently published proposed MPEG7 standard.
Just separating the objects is not sufficient—the objects need to be tracked throughout a given sequence of images that make up a scene. What is desired is a method for tracking objects within a video image sequence.